Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

As you would expect from a medium that has survived decades, comic books have changed with time to adapt to changes in culture.  In Comic Book Nation, Bradford W. Wright describes that history from the birth of comics as a new medium in the 1930s through the 1990s. Though the book was published a decade ago, it still provides a good perspective on where comics are. He mentions the advent of electronic publishing at the close of the book. I think it is fair to say that electronic publishing and distribution has not radically changed comics, though there may be potential for that in recent developments in the business of self-publishing comics electronically.

Bradford is an academic historian. Comic Book Nation is intended to be a cultural history of comics. Of course, Bradford can’t help but cover some the same ground that other writers cover, though this book predates many of the more academic or journalistic books on the subject. Some publishers, creators, and titles are just too important and influential not to mention. Even so, he tries to stick to his purpose and show how the times were reflected in comics.

I think it is fair to say that comics, and popular media generally, reflect cultures more than they influence them. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be popular. This reflection isn’t always simplistic, even in comics. Comics writers and artists, like other producers of popular media, tried to address the concerns and interests of their audiences, sometimes realistically, sometimes idealistically, and sometimes with cynicism.

Of course, it was Superman who sparked the immense popularity of superhero comics, and comics generally. That popularity spawned imitators, as it does today. The early Superman, created by Cleveland high school students Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, was a reformer. He battled gangsters and crooked politicians. He was a New Dealer. Many comics supported New Deal policies to address the Great Depression.

Superheroes made the transition to World War II with ease. Writers had to address why the costumed crusaders weren’t enlisting or bringing the war to a swift end. They must have succeeded, because superhero titles were very popular, even among American soldiers. Comics were pro-war, and many costumed heroes were battling foreign menaces, especially the Nazis, even before America entered the war.

Superhero titles floundered after the war, but other genres did well. Comics generally supported American policies of intervention in smaller nations and containment of Communism. The medium reflected the post-war hopefulness that there could be peace and international cooperation with America leading as a benevolent superpower.

The post-war years had troubles, too. People feared the misuse and spread of nuclear weapons. The Korean War was a doubtful venture that many felt lacked the clear and good purpose of World War II. This applied to Viet Nam, too, where the additional problems of guerilla warfare challenged notions of heroism.

Comic books faced other challenges. The excesses of crime and horror comics brought about industry-operated censorship. Television competed for the time and money of children.

Much of the latter part of the book shows how the comics industry found a way to survive these problems. The 1960s introduced a resurgence of creativity and superheroes, especially the flawed fantasy men of Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics. New models of distribution were introduced in the 1980s. Electronic media has the potential to reinvigorate comics.

Because my adolescence was in the 1980s, I’d like to mention a few things about it. Unlike some comics historians, Bradford spends a fair amount of time on that decade, especially in a book that covers more than 60 years. He provides a pretty good description of how Frank Miller and Alan Moore challenged the superhero model and brought a lot of new interest to it. If anything, Miller and Moore were too influential. A lot of comics are still derivative of their best works.  Imitation of success is common in comics, and too often the imitators do not have the skill or understanding of the masters.

What I’d really like to mention is that Bradford acknowledges John Byrne’s contribution. Byrne was a very popular writer and artist in the 1980s. He did some pretty good stuff, too. He also indulged in excesses that presaged the excesses of the 1990s, but at least he did it with a self-aware wink. Byrne brought fun back to comics. Then as now, I like comics with a good dose of fun.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

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The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

World War II was a time when secrecy was often a necessary part of security. The secrecy surrounding the development to of the atomic bomb was particularly thick. Since that veil was lifted, Las Alamos, Nevada, has become strongly associated with the bomb, as it should be. However, there were other locations critical to the project. Denis Kiernan discusses one of them, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in her book The Girls of Atomic City.

The Clinton Engineer Works was part of the Manhattan Project. Its purpose was the enrichment of uranium to supply the research, development and construction of an atomic weapon. When it was built, the Army took over thousands of acres of farmland in Tennessee, displacing the residents. Oak Ridge did not exist before the project.

As the title suggests, Kiernan focuses on the role of women at the Clinton Engineer Works, as the area was known when it was a military reservation. The book draws on her interviews with women who worked at the site; the experiences of nine particular women serve as guideposts for the story. These women served in a variety of roles: statistician, chemist, inspector, equipment operator, nurse, secretary, and janitor. Some became wives and mothers as well during the war years. It was an interesting time when there was space for women in science, technology and manufacturing, but not a lot.

Kiernan reaches outside of Oak Ridge to mention other notable women who played a part. German physicist Lise Meitner coined the term nuclear fission; she had Jewish ancestors and fled to Sweden as the Nazis came to power in her homeland. Earlier, Ida Noddack was the first to suggest that the atomic nucleus could split, an idea that was initially rejected by many scientists studying radioactivity and the inner workings of the atom.

The growth of families in a place designed solely for one purpose suggested a result that had not been considered when the Army started to build the Clinton Engineer Works. Oak Ridge was becoming a community and it eventually became an incorporated city (in 1958 by a vote of the residents after federal and state laws opened the opportunity). Though the population dropped dramatically from its war-time peak, Oak Ridge remained a center for research in nuclear energy and the peace-time use of radioactive materials as it transitioned to civilian control. Today the Oak Ridge National Laboratory continues research in energy and computing. The city of Oak Ridge continues as well, still connected to its past as a unique factory town, but in many way a city like any other.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Planck by Brandon R. Brown

The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman

The Supergirls by Mike Madrid

Kiernan, Denise. The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II. 2013. New York Touchstone: 2014.

London Under by Peter Ackroyd

London is an ancient city. The Romans established a settlement their a thousand years ago, but they weren’t the first inhabitants of the valley. It sits on soil into which everything slowly sinks. Rivers that brought life to the valley became choked with filth and were buried. The ground under London is thick with history, and the infrastructure of a modern metropolis mingles with the remains of its ancestors. Peter Ackroyd describes what is beneath the surface of that great city in London Under.

Ackroyd goes back to the earliest settlers of the area and the archeological remains of their lives. Their holy places were overbuilt by Roman temples. The temples dedicated to Roman gods were overbuilt by churches. Old paths became Roman roads. The filth of a city covered these roads and turned them back into dirt paths. Modern people paved them anew with brick, and later asphalt or concrete. It’s all still there, though, one thing layered over the other, but often still following the outlines ancient paths.

As you might expect from a man with who has worked with water, some of my favorite chapters relate to the rivers and sewers. London was built around rivers. As the population grew, these rivers became open sewers, carrying away all manner of waste until they were too filthy and stinking to bear. These rivers were enclosed and became underground sewers. As the city grew, it overwhelmed the sewers and turned the Thames into a stinking mess. Eventually it inconvenienced Parliament enough that they engaged the problems seriously in the 19^th Century, putting in place interceptor sewers that carried the waste away from the city. Many of the sewers that are now more than a century old are still in use.

Another feature of London that fascinates my engineering side is the Underground. The city has the oldest underground railway system. The first lines are more than 150 years old. It was built in bits and pieces by competing private companies, though now it is a unified system. The Underground has become such a part of London life that a literature related to it has developed. The tunnels have been the settings of novels and the inspiration for poems.

World War II and the Cold War were another significant phase of buried construction. The British government built many tunnels and bunkers to protect government resources threatened by war. During World War II, so many people sought shelter in the Underground that the government was forced to provide shelter space for people escaping the bombs.

Like any modern city, London now has an extensive underground infrastructure. Pipelines carry drinking water, sewerage, electric and telephone wires, fiber optic cables and all the other things that connect people to services in their homes and workplaces.  These important systems are hidden underground, out of site and possibly too often out of mind, where their work apparently does not disturb the sleeping remains of the many things that had come before.

If you are interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

The Water Room by Christopher Fowler

Ackroyd, Peter. London Under: The Secret History beneath the Streets. New York: Anchor, 2011.

Planck by Brandon R. Brown

German physicist Max Planck was one of the most famous and well-respected scientists of his day. His work formed the foundation of quantum mechanics and is still relevant to physics today. He lived through both world wars, and these resulted in tragedy for his family.

Planck is a brief biography of the man by another physicist, Brandon R. Brown. Brown focuses his book on the last years of World War II, but from there reaches far back to his subject’s birth in 1858 and forward a little to his death in 1947. It is interesting that Brown did not choose to take a chronological approach given that entropy and the irreversibility of time were subjects of great interest to Planck. Perhaps he wants to readers to be somewhat unsettled, no doubt the way Planck must have been unsettled by events of his lifetime and the conclusions younger scientists drew from his own theories.

Brown presents Planck and as a flexible thinker who contributed to physics and accepted new theories at an age when most of his contemporaries were ready to shut the books on what could be learned. Apparently what most of us like to think of as middle-aged (at worst) is ancient for a physicist. His own work on thermal radiation established fundamental concepts of quantum theory, though he didn’t use the term “quanta.” When a young Albert Einstein proposed his special theory of relativity, Planck quick promote and build on it. He was slower to come around to general relativity (as wild as it is to us, it was insane to many in that time), and both men suffered philosophical heartburn from the quantum mechanics served up by the generation that came up under them.

Planck was very loyal to his country. His brother Hermann died in the Franco-Prussian War, and the family became intensely patriotic. At the start of World War I, he was hopeful that the war might strengthen and unify Germany. His oldest son, Karl, died at Verdun, and Germany fell on hard times.

Things were more complex when the Nazis took power. At times, his reputation as the nation’s most prominent scientist gave him leeway to resist anti-Semitic policies. At other times he acquiesced, hoping that the excesses of Nazi policies would be smoothed out or even reversed by the necessities of governing and the needs of the nation. He was so hopeful he even encouraged Jewish colleagues to stay. The Nazis saw no need for moderation, so Planck’s influence quickly waned. His son, Erwin, became involved in a resistance movement that hoped to topple the Nazis. He was implicated in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Though the Planck family appealed to every ear in and around the Nazi regime that might have sympathy, Erwin was convicted and eventually hanged. (Planck survived his first wife and four of his five children).

Brown doesn’t judge Planck too harshly, though some might. He had no love for the Nazis, but perhaps too much love for Germany, its scientific achievement, and its international standing, may have made him reluctant to boldly oppose them. This led to a break in his relationship with Einstein, though the younger eminence spoke very kindly of Planck even many years later. Because of he refused to embrace the Nazis, and he was well-liked by many foreign scientists, the Allies gave him a place in rebuilding the German scientific establishment after the war. The British, French, and Americans reorganized scientific institutes into the Max Planck Society, which is still active in supporting all manner of scientific endeavor.

I think the book is approachable for most adult readers who may have an interest in Planck or his times. Brown does not get so deep so deep into the science that he loses readers; he tries to explain it in a way that will make sense to a general audience. The structure of the book may make it difficult for a young reader to follow.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time by Peter Galison 

Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios

Brandon R. Brown. Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

On February 5, 1946, The Adventures of Superman radio program opened with a new introduction:

Yes, it’s Superman.  Strange visitor from another planet, who came to earth with powers and abilities farbeyond those of mortal men.  Superman, defender of law and order, champion of equal rights, valiant, courageous fighter against the forces of hate and prejudice!

This announced the beginning of the radio Superman’s struggle with post-war social issues, especially a campaign against racial and religious intolerance.  In this adventure, Jimmy Olsen infiltrated the Guardians of America, a fictional stand-in for pro-Nazi groups that were operating in the United States at the time.  This was only the beginning.  Later that year, Adventures would feature a 16-episode story in which Superman took on the Clan of the Fiery Cross, a stand-in for the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

Behind these fictional stories of Superman were real-life adventures.  The KKK was attempting to launch a new national membership drive, playing on the insecurities people felt after World War II.  There were real infiltrators of the KKK and other organized hatemongers who exposed the workings of these organizations in the media.  Rick Bowers tells the story of these men and the producers of the comic book and radio Superman in Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan.

Superman had been dealing with cultural concerns from his beginning.  When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Jewish high-school students in Cleveland, created Superman in the 1930s, they pitted him against criminal gangs and crooked politicians.  As Nazi Germany began to rise as an aggressive European power, the hero opposed Nazis at home and abroad.  During the war, he protected the home front.   Though it is not the focus, Bowers describes how Superman has changes with the concerns of the times.

The Klan has roots going back to the Reconstruction era after the Civil War.  It started as a jokey order of former Confederate Army officers in Tennessee who imitated the mystery religion-inspired fraternal orders that were popular at colleges, with mysterious rituals and strange names.  It spawned imitators that secretly gathered in Nashville to organize themselves in 1867.  Former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest was the first Grand Wizard, who lead the Klan in opposition to Reconstruction, including domestic terrorism against blacks and white proponents of racial equality and Reconstruction policies.  The violence of the Klan members, called Ghouls, eroded the organization’s popularity.

William J. Simmons launched a campaign to revive the Klan, taking it national in 1920.  For Simmons it was largely a moneymaking scheme, though he seemed happy to promote intolerance of blacks, Jews, Catholics, immigrants and anyone else who wasn’t a white, male Protestant.  (I’m a white, male Protestant and I find nothing in Protestantism, or Christianity in general, that justifies the intolerance promoted by the Klan.)  Successors led the Klan to political activism in the 1920s, and it became very powerful, but front-line violence and leadership hypocrisy undermined their position.  The post-war membership campaign, led by Samuel Green who was Grand Dragon of the Georgia Realm, was thwarted by law enforcement and equal rights advocates with help of medial like Adventures.

The library helpfully labeled Bowers’ book with a sticker that reads, “TEEN.”  I suppose it is a young adult book, though I think it is within the grasp of many middle school students.  It is an unusual introduction to the history of bigotry in American and the movements that promoted equality, but the tie to a popular superhero might make the subject more appealing to kids in school.  It made me pick up the book, and I’m far passed my school days.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Maus by Art Spiegelman

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Bowers, Rick.  Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan.  Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2012.

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Books That Made a Difference to Me

I’m not a regular reader of O: The Oprah Magazine, but when I come across one, I turn to the “reading room” segment. In each issue, they have a celebrity, author or other notable person comment on a few books that they find notable. I enjoy reading and I’m curious about what other people enjoy reading, even if I don’t share their tastes. What follows are books that made a difference to me roughly in the style of the O feature.

The Holy Bible

As a believer in Christ, this book is a touchstone for me. The Bible is one of the ways God reveals himself, and it is the most explicit, specific, definitive and accessible special revelation. Jesus compared the word of God to a mirror, and said those who didn’t do it were like someone walking away from a mirror and forgetting what they looked like. Within its pages, the metaphor of a sword is applied to God’s word. One the great uses of this sword is to, in indelicate terms, cut through the crap.

Simple Pictures are Best
By Nancy Willard
Illustrations by Tomie De Paola

This is a children’s book and I first read it as a boy. It has so influenced me that I sometimes use the phrase “simple pictures are best” in conversation. The moral of this parable is to keep it simple, don’t create unnecessary complications. I’m not immune to mission creep and function overload. However, this book helped me develop an early appreciation for focus, setting priorities and enjoying those things that do one thing very well.

Spider-Man Created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko

I could carry on for some time about all that is great about Spider-Man. The essence of it is this: the core of Peter Parker and his story is ethics. Behind the mask, he is just a man and he is just as concerned with his family, friends and job as with battling supervillains. Like us, Peter faces the costly rewards of doing what is right and the painful price of choosing what is wrong in a complex world he doesn’t fully understand. What makes him a hero isn’t his power, it is his character.

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race By Edwin Black

The atrocities of the Nazis were justified, in their minds, as a science-based policy for managing society. The science was eugenics; it originated in American. I was amazed that not only did it start here, but also one of its largest proponents and popularizers worked in my home state, Missouri. Black thoroughly traces eugenics from it roots in an America, both as a science and a policy, to its leap to other nations, its ultimate expression as policy in Nazi Germany and its aftermath, which continues to linger in science and politics. Today, calls for science-based policy are often in the news, but it is important that both policy and science be informed by ethics. (Edwin Black also wrote IBM and the Holocaust.)

The Road to Serfdom
By F. A. Hayek

Hayek devoted this book “to socialists of all parties.” His particular audience was the British intelligentsia (Hayek was an economics professor at the University of London and familiar with German intellectual life from his years in his native Austria). His message was a warning: socialism leads to totalitarianism. Socialism was a popular movement in the time Hayek wrote this book (first published in 1944). Even the United States looked to the communist, fascist and national socialist governments of the world as models to emulate (until we entered World War II and many of these governments became our enemies). Today, socialist ideas and policies are widely espoused, though few would put the socialist label on them, and their proponents seem to imagine, some may be convinced and some may pretend, that a planned society can still be a free one. Hayek demonstrates that socialist government and individual freedom cannot coexist for long.

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Jones, Gerard.  Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book.  New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Reviewing Gerard Jones’ history of the comic book industry makes me feel like I’m pitching a new show to the cable networks.  It’s a little like Mad Men.  There is less suavity, but plenty of smoking, drinking, and womanizing.  There is room for some gratuitous nudity.  Many of the comics publishers came from got started in spicy pulps and nudie mags.  They were hustlers from the street, too, many with mob connections.  So we can have a touch of Boardwalk Jungle, though the violence is contained to the muscular fantasies of young men wanting to overcome a sense of powerlessness.  Of course, there may be comparisono to The Big Bang Theory, especially when you have scenes of young men working side-by-side at typewriters and drawing boards, helping and competing with each other.  Most aren’t geniuses, but plenty are awkward and pretentious.  It even has a great name: Men of Tomorrow.

The book is a mostly chronological look at the development of comics.  It starts with the pulp publishers.  As the pulps declined for various reasons of economics and taste, the comics rose their peak in World War II.  Patriotic superheroes were depicted punching Hitler in the face before America entered the war.  Superhero comics declined after the war, especially due to competition from television, though other genres did well.  Some of them, especially crime and horror, attracted the attention of reformers who wanted a clean and upright media safe for children and a culture longing for conformity and peace.  Comics found a new life as baby boomers came of age, partly because of interest in new dysfunctional heroes of Stan Lee and his collaborators and partly because cheap underground comics were exploring the youth counterculture.  Finally, comics became an almost mainstream medium, especially superheroes who successfully moved into film and other media.

There are almost too many people discussed in this book to mention.  Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz built a shady distributor of sex stories and porn into a pillar of a major media corporation.  Along the way, their conflict with Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster became the stuff of comics legend that occasionally broke into mainstream consciousness.  In many retellings of this story, Donenfeld and Liebowitz are demonized and Siegel and Shuster lionized.  Jones mostly resists this urge, treating the New York publishers with some fairness and showing how the cartoonists from Cleveland were the cause of some of their own trouble.  There is a host of other notables from trash publishing (Hugo Gernsback and Bernarr McFadden), organized crime (Frank Costello and Mayer Lansky), failed teachers and academics (Charlie Gaines and William Moulton Marston), and finally from comics (Charlie Biro, Bob Kane, Jack Cole, Jack Kirby, and many more).

Many of these people grew up in Jewish immigrant families.  Their successes and failures in the 1920s and 1930s, their readiness for war in the 1940s, and their search for an identity both American and Jewish in the postwar year reflects the journey of a larger community.  In addition to being a story of comics, it is a story of how Jews, immigrants, science fiction, and geeks moved from the edges of American society toward the mainstream—or maybe the mainstream widened to encompass them.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

American Splendor (Film)

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

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Lights Out by Ted Koppel

Much of the world, and America is particular, is heavily networked through a vast, distributed communication system of computers, cables, and transceivers. All this runs on electricity. Our major infrastructure is dependent on electrical power: water, sanitation, healthcare, communication and transportation. These systems, indeed even the systems that generate and distribute electricity are increasing controlled by networked computers.

This makes America extremely vulnerable to cyberattacks aimed at the electric system. If a major section of the power grid goes out, millions of people could be left without clean water, waste disposal and food. A well-orchestrated cyberattack could leave large parts of the country without power for as long as a year.

Journalist Ted Koppel explores this situation, and criticizes America’s state of unpreparedness and sometimes denial, in his book Lights Out. There are three major parts to his book.

First, he explores the vulnerability of the electrical system to cyberattack. I think he makes a fairly convincing case that the system is vulnerable and that some agents very likely already have the capacity to cause major damage to the system that could affect huge parts of the country.

Second, he looks into the state of our policies and preparedness. As you might expect for a nation of 50 co-sovereign governments, it is a patchwork. In addition, the major actors in preventing, planning for, and responding to catastrophes are focused on natural disasters or physical attacks by terrorists. These things shouldn’t be ignored, but the scale of a cyberattack on the electrical system could have a much larger scope in terms of the populations and territories affected.

Finally, he looks at how prepared the country is for the aftermath of such an attack. The answer is we are woefully unprepared. He looks into the prepper movement and the vast resources the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has put into readiness. He finds some models there, but no one has the resources to respond to such a massive disaster.

Of course, the issue is not simple. Preventing such an attack is difficult even if all the competing interests (utilities, federal agencies, local and state governments, privacy advocates, and many others) could agree on what to do, who should do it, and how far their authority should extend. It is all hugely expensive, especially preparing to respond to a massive outage, and it would take years to get ready.

Even so, Koppel clearly thinks we should acknowledge this vulnerability and start doing something about it. An imperfect plan, even if it is too little to late (it’s already too late because cyberattacks are already happening and major attacks could be launched with the press of a button), is better than no plan. He looks to the civil defense planning during World War II and the Cold War. Much of it was misguided or for show, but we learned valuable lessons that helped us make more effective responses and develop better policies.

Koppel writes as a journalist for a wide audience, and that was his intention. Readers do not need a background in engineering, utilities or security to understand the issues he brings up or their implications.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems by Henry Petroski

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

Koppel, Ted. Lights Out. New York: Crown, 2015.

Waste and Want by Susan Strasser

An old proverb relates trash and treasure as a matter of perspective. In Waste and Want, Susan Strasser describes American’s changing perspectives on waste from the colonial era to our own day.

In the colonial and revolutionary period of American history, manufactured objects were rare and expensive. Repair and mending were common even among the wealthy because it was difficult and costly to replace objects. In addition, the various types of home industry practiced by both men and women equipped them with skills in handling materials that made them adept at repair. Even when and object was beyond repair, it parts, or the material it was made of, might be usefully repurposed themselves or as part of an assembly. This lack of goods and facility with handling materials made bricolage common. Because things had durable value, people had a sense of stewardship relating to them.

Strasser establishes this as a beginning state. The development of industry and consumerism led to a current state in which all of these have been reversed. We have an abundance of goods, and many of them are inexpensive. We work in factories and offices where we do not develop skills for repair, and particularly have lost familiarity with materials needed for practical bricolage. These and other forces, particularly those related to health and cleanliness, have resulted in waste being something of the home where additional value may be extracted to something that is the realm of specialists that is taken away and handled by government agencies or specialized companies.

There are many stages in this development. It is interesting to me that the value of household waste as raw materials American industry provided a mechanism for poor and rural people to purchase manufactured goods. Even so, as industrialization made more goods available, along with larger quantities of more manageable waste, household waste became less valuable, and reuse and recycling became associated with poverty.

By the end of the 1920s, consumer culture was established in America, and it reinforced the trends identified by Strasser.  Planned obsolescence was developed in the automotive industry, and along with the craze for fashion, it took hold for almost all consumer goods. Even during the Great Depression, when lack of credit and unemployment made doing it yourself attractive, there was an assumption that people had access to new and old consumer goods and their packaging. Even during this period of economic distress, demand for certain types of consumer goods grew. Thrift was reimaged for a consumer age. For instance, refrigerators became commonplace, and instead of being presented as luxury items they were sold on the notion of thrift, allowing housewives to save on food by keeping leftovers and buying in bulk.

People were encouraged to conserve and recycle to support the war effort during World War II. However, this did little to reverse changing attitudes that valued the new over the old and saw little value in trash. People had jobs and money, and wartime rationing created a pent up demand for goods that was unleased after the war. Disposable goods and packaging represented cleanliness and convenience; it was freedom from dirt and drudgery. There was no value in trash, which was taken away by collectors.

There were reactions against this even in the 1950s. They grew into the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, which were skeptical of corporations and consumerism. The environmental movement also grew out of this counterculture. Reuse of second-hand goods became more acceptable for even middle-class families, though few had the skills needed to rework these items to make them seem new or adapt them to current fashion. Little used goods were seen to have some value that could be recovered through yard sales. (I grew up on a stretch of highway that now boasts and annual 100 mile yard sale.)

This counterculture has not resulted in a broad return to a stewardship of things. Strasser suggests that a rising ethic of environmental or resource stewardship may lead to the mitigation of problems related to the abundant trash created by disposable and rapidly obsolete goods. There is no turning back, but we might find new reasons and ways to reduce use, reuse, and recycle.

Stasser, Susan. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999.